Before I went to college, I worked for a spider taxonomist for a summer. By most standards, it was a peculiar, if not unpleasant, species group to be working with. I wasn’t necessarily the biggest fan of creepy crawlies before this undertaking, but my boss then brought a special magic to the experience that made me utterly fall in love with them. “Look at the shape of that carapace!” he’d exclaim, and I’d look, and it’d be beautiful, and unlike anything I’d ever seen before. I think spiders became for me then what species groups like birds, corals, butterflies, and…